Visual Genome — a data set, a knowledge base, an ongoing effort to connect structured image concepts to language.
Google’s Software Defined Networking — [What was the biggest risk you faced rolling out the network? …] we were breaking the fate-sharing principle—which is to say we were putting ourselves in a situation where either the controller could fail without the switch failing, or the switch could fail without the controller failing. That generally leads to big problems in distributed computing, as many people learned the hard way once remote procedure calls became a dominant paradigm.
Philips Backtrack on Lightbulb DRM — In view of the sentiment expressed by our customers, we have decided to reverse the software upgrade so that lights from other brands continue to work as they did before with the Philips Hue system.
Pwning Tomorrow — EFF Publishes SF Anthology. You can expect liberties and freedoms to feature.
Face Director — Disney software to match faces between takes. We demonstrate that our method can synthesize visually believable performances with applications in emotion transition, performance correction, and timing control.
Move Fast and Fix Things — blow by blow of an engineering rewrite of some key functionality at GitHub, interesting from a “oh so that’s how they do it” point of view (if blow-by-blow engineering rewrites qualify as “interesting” to you).
Old Book Illustrations — public domain book illustrations, tagged and searchable. Yes, like Font Awesome of engraving.
Japanese Scientists Create Touchable Holograms (Reuters) — Using femtosecond laser technology, the researchers developed ‘Fairy Lights, a system that can fire high-frequency laser pulses that last one millionth of one billionth of a second. The pulses respond to human touch, so that – when interrupted – the hologram’s pixels can be manipulated in mid-air.
Google Cloud Vision API — classifies images into thousands of categories (e.g., “boat,” “lion,” “Eiffel Tower”), detects faces with associated emotions, and recognizes printed words in many languages.
Behind the Hoverboard Craze (BoingBoing) — Bernstein is interested in this phenomenon as “memeufacturing” — a couple of social-media stars (or garden-variety celebs) post viral videos of themselves using an obscure gadget, and halfway around the world, factories shut down their e-cig lines and convert them, almost overnight, to hoverboard manufacturing lines. Bernstein cites a source who says that there are 1,000 hoverboard factories in South China.
neural-vqa — VIS+LSTM model for Visual Question Answering. Scroll to the end and see the questions it’s answering about photos.
Open Season in Editing Genes of Animals (NY Times) — “We’re going to see a stream of edited animals coming through because it’s so easy,” said Bruce Whitelaw, a professor of animal biotechnology at the Roslin Institute at the University of Edinburgh. “It’s going to change the societal question from, ‘If we could do it, would we want it?’ to, ‘Next year we will have it; will we allow it?’”
RTS AI (PDF) — standard techniques used for playing classic board games, such as game tree search, cannot be directly applied to solve RTS games without the definition of some level of abstraction, or some other simplification. Interestingly enough, humans seem to be able to deal with the complexity of RTS games, and are still vastly superior to computers in these types of games. Talks about the challenges in writing AIs for Real-Time Strategy games.
magspoof — a portable device that can spoof/emulate any magnetic stripe or credit card “wirelessly,” even on standard magstripe readers.
LittleD — open source relational database for embedded devices and sensors nodes.
iondb — open source key-value datastore for resource constrained systems.
Stanford Multicamera Array — 128 cameras, reconfigurable. If the cameras are packed close together, then the system effectively functions as a single-center-of-projection synthetic camera, which we can configure to provide unprecedented performance along one or more imaging dimensions, such as resolution, signal-to-noise ratio, dynamic range, depth of field, frame rate, or spectral sensitivity. If the cameras are placed farther apart, then the system functions as a multiple-center-of-projection camera, and the data it captures is called a light field. Of particular interest to us are novel methods for estimating 3D scene geometry from the dense imagery captured by the array, and novel ways to construct multi-perspective panoramas from light fields, whether captured by this array or not. Finally, if the cameras are placed at an intermediate spacing, then the system functions as a single camera with a large synthetic aperture, which allows us to see through partially occluding environments like foliage or crowds.
DeepDive — Stanford project to create structured data (SQL tables) from unstructured information (text documents) and integrate such data with an existing structured database. DeepDive is used to extract sophisticated relationships between entities and make inferences about facts involving those entities. Code is open source (Apache v2 license). (via Infoworld)
Visual Microphone (MIT) — turn everyday objects — a glass of water, a potted plant, a box of tissues, or a bag of chips — into visual microphones using high-speed photography to detect the small vibrations caused by sound. (via Infoworld)
Statistical Patterns in Movie Ratings (PLOSone) — We find that the distribution of votes presents scale-free behavior over several orders of magnitude, with an exponent very close to 3/2, with exponential cutoff. It is remarkable that this pattern emerges independently of movie attributes such as average rating, age and genre, with the exception of a few genres and of high-budget films.
The Inspection Bias is Everywhere — In 1991, Scott Feld presented the “friendship paradox”: the observation that most people have fewer friends than their friends have. He studied real-life friends, but the same effect appears in online networks: if you choose a random Facebook user, and then choose one of their friends at random, the chance is about 80% that the friend has more friends. The friendship paradox is a form of the inspection paradox. When you choose a random user, every user is equally likely. But when you choose one of their friends, you are more likely to choose someone with a lot of friends. Specifically, someone with x friends is overrepresented by a factor of x.
s3ql — a file system that stores all its data online using storage services like Google Storage, Amazon S3, or OpenStack. S3QL effectively provides a hard disk of dynamic, infinite capacity that can be accessed from any computer with internet access running Linux, FreeBSD or OS-X. (GPLv3)
Large-scale Cluster Management at Google with Borg — Google’s Borg system is a cluster manager that runs hundreds of thousands of jobs, from many thousands of different applications, across a number of clusters, each with up to tens of thousands of machines. […] We present a summary of the Borg system architecture and features, important design decisions, a quantitative analysis of some of its policy decisions, and a qualitative examination of lessons learned from a decade of operational experience with it.
Georgia Sues Carl Malamud (TechDirt) — for copyright infringement… for publishing an official annotated copy of the state's laws. […] the state points directly to the annotated version as the official laws of the state.
DeepDream — the software that’s been giving the Internet acid-free trips.
In-Flight WiFi Business — numbers and context for why some airlines (JetBlue) have fast free in-flight wifi while others (Delta) have pricey slow in-flight wifi. Four years ago ViaSat-1 went into geostationary orbit, putting all other broadband satellites to shame with 140 Gbps of total capacity. This is the Ka-band satellite that JetBlue’s fleet connects to, and while the airline has to share that bandwidth with homes across of North America that subscribe to ViaSat’s Excede residential broadband service, it faces no shortage of capacity. That’s why JetBlue is able to deliver 10-15 Mbps speeds to its passengers.
British Library Digitising Newspapers (The Guardian) — as well as photogrammetry methods used in the Great Parchment Book project, Terras and colleagues are exploring the potential of a host of techniques, including multispectral imaging (MSI). Inks, pencil marks, and paper all reflect, absorb, or emit particular wavelengths of light, ranging from the infrared end of the electromagnetic spectrum, through the visible region and into the UV. By taking photographs using different light sources and filters, it is possible to generate a suite of images. “We get back this stack of about 40 images of the [document] and then we can use image-processing to try to see what is in [some of them] and not others,” Terras explains.
Testing a Distributed System (ACM) — This article discusses general strategies for testing distributed systems as well as specific strategies for testing distributed data storage systems.
IRS Finally Agrees to Release Non-Profit Records (BoingBoing) — Today, the IRS released a statement saying they’re going to do what we’ve been hoping for, saying they are going to release e-file data and this is a “priority for the IRS.” Only took $217,000 in billable lawyer hours (pro bono, thank goodness) to get there.
Compiler Errors for Humans — it’s so important, and generally underbaked in languages. A decade or more ago, I was appalled by Python’s errors after Perl’s very useful messages. Today, appreciating Go’s generally handy errors. How a system handles the operational failures that will inevitably occur is part and parcel of its UX.